The SEI helps advance software engineering principles and practices and serves as a national resource in software engineering, computer security, and process improvement. The SEI works closely with defense and government organizations, industry, and academia to continually improve software-intensive systems. Its core purpose is to help organizations improve their software engineering capabilities and develop or acquire the right software, defect free, within budget and on time, every time.

Tools and Methods for Documenting the Architecture

Because architectures are intellectual constructs of enduring and long-lived importance, communicating an architecture to its stakeholders becomes as important a job as creating it in the first place. If the architecture cannot be understood so that others can build systems from it, analyze it, maintain it, and learn from it, then the effort put into crafting it will mostly have been wasted.

To plan effectively for a product, the architecture must be documented in sufficient detail and presented in an easily accessible form for developers and other stakeholders. The architecture is one of the major mechanisms that allows stakeholders to communicate about the properties of a system.

To document the architecture, the SEI uses the Architecture Documentation, Views and Beyond approach.The SEI can work together with a customer's staff to determine which views of the architecture are useful for the stakeholders, the amount of detail required, and how the information can be efficiently presented.